Associate Professor Chris Danta will be presenting his new work on 'Panpsychism and Speculative Evolutionary Aesthetics in Samuel Butler’s The Book of the Machines” at a special Futures Thinking event on 14 June 2019.
Chris Danta is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia, in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. His first book, Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011), theorises the idea of literature in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot based on the treatment by these writers of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. His second book, Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism, and Metaphor (Cambridge University Press, 2018), emerges from an ARC-funded Discovery project and demonstrates how the rise of the biological sciences in the second half of the nineteenth century provides literary writers such as Stevenson, H. G. Wells, T. F. Powys, David Garnett, Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee with new material for the fable, new ways to exploit the grotesque comparison of human and ape.
A small wine reception will take place after the event, and the building is accessible. Please do contact us at futuresthinking@torch.ox.ac.uk if you have any access needs or requirements.
Please register via Eventbrite. If you would prefer not to use Eventbrite, please contact the event organisers directly at futuresthinking@torch.ox.ac.uk.
